by Julia Baird
The queen chose to ignore all evidence against the Munshi for as long as she could. In April 1897, Henry Ponsonby wrote:
We have been having a good deal of trouble lately about the Munshi here, and although we have tried our best, we cannot get the Queen to realize how very dangerous it is for her to allow this man to see every confidential paper relating to India. The Queen insists on bringing the Munshi forward as much as she can, & if it were not for our protest, I don’t know where She would stop. Fortunately he happens to be a thoroughly stupid and uneducated man, & his one idea in life seems to be to do nothing & to eat as much as he can.
Most of Karim’s social elbowing was harmless. What was of greater concern to the men of the household was how the Munshi gradually inveigled his way into handling—and, increasingly, shaping—the queen’s correspondence regarding his country. Karim was bent on persuading the queen to address the plight of Muslim minorities in India, including their representation on local councils. Victoria automatically began to pass to Karim any Indian petitions that she thought required only a polite refusal, allowing him to respond.
The real problem, Ponsonby continued, was that while Karim himself was dim, he had a clever friend, Rafiuddin Ahmed, who was involved with the Muslim Patriotic League in London. Karim had previously urged Victoria to help promote Ahmed’s career at the bar, which she had dutifully done. At one point, the queen even suggested he be sent to the embassy at Constantinople to ensure a Muslim diplomatic presence. This request was refused by the prime minister, Lord Salisbury, who told her he would have leapt at the opportunity were it not for the prejudice other people harbored. There were broad suspicions that Ahmed had been leaking state secrets to English enemies in Afghanistan—then controlled by Britain—and extracting crucial information from the Munshi, who was by now reading “the Viceroy’s letters, & any letters of importance that come from India.” When the Munshi traveled with Victoria to Europe that summer of 1898, against the wishes of the court, he foolishly invited Ahmed to come too. Ahmed was promptly kicked out by Arthur Bigge, who had succeeded Sir Henry Ponsonby as the queen’s private secretary after Ponsonby died in 1895. It was then, as the court settled into the Hotel Excelsior Regina looking out over the shimmering Mediterranean in Nice, that the tensions finally erupted.
Victoria’s doctor steeled himself for a prolonged, unpleasant confrontation with his queen. He felt he had little choice; it was not just that this Indian man was irritating and controlling, but he was a potential threat to Britain’s security. What was at stake now, Dr. Reid declared boldly to a solemn Victoria, was the reputation of the throne. The chief of police in London had told Dr. Reid that the Munshi was embroiled with the Muslim Patriotic League. Dr. Reid, spurred by a mixture of legitimate grievances and snobbish gossip, made sure the queen knew that he had “been questioned as to her sanity.” Victoria burst into tears. She knew what people said about her, and admitted to Dr. Reid “she had been foolish in acceding to his constant demands for advancement but yet trying to shield him.” Over the next few days, Victoria veered between repentance and rage.
It was finally time to confront the “scoundrel” Karim. While other members of the court were walking along the curved beach below, Dr. Reid wheeled on him, telling him he knew he was “an impostor” from a low class, who was uneducated, inexperienced as a secretary, and had “a double face, one which you show to the Queen, and another when you leave her room.” He also accused Karim of cheating the queen of money. Karim had claimed receipts were not required for any expenses in India and so should not be required of him in Britain; as his expenses mounted, suspicions grew. By the time the group left France weeks later, Karim was subdued. An exhausted Victoria told her gentlemen to stop talking “about this painful subject.” She continued to defend her “poor M.” and repeatedly said that the Indians who disliked him did so because they were Hindus and he was Muslim. Victoria continued to fight back for the next two years, trying to clear the Munshi’s name as well as the name of his friend Ahmed.
Part of Victoria’s attachment to her Indian attendants arose from her own need for gentle physical care. She was then well into her seventies, and the complications caused by pregnancy, labor, and weight gain had made walking hellish and standing for any length of time impossible. Just as Albert had done when she was convalescing from childbirth, she wanted to be lifted carefully and tenderly from bed to chair, and chair to carriage. The Indians, she wrote, were “so clever” when they lifted her, and “they never pinch me.” What her court saw, but refused to recognize, was the value of the succor a quiet, attentive man brought to an aging queen.
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In 1895, grief came again to the court. Beatrice’s husband, the beloved Liko, asked if he could serve in the Ashanti mission in Africa, wherein Britain would gain control of the gold-rich lands now known as Ghana. Liko’s relationship with Beatrice had cooled, and he had become close to her beautiful sister Louise. An artistic, intelligent woman, Louise was a talented sculptor whose husband was almost certainly gay; she conducted affairs outside her marriage and had a decades-long liaison with a mentor, the sculptor Joseph Edgar Boehm. When Liko and Beatrice suspected that Louise was having an affair with the queen’s new secretary, Arthur Bigge, Louise accused them of a smear campaign. Lord Lorne was forced to come to her defense as the rows in the royal family grew ugly. Liko escaped to war, with Victoria’s reluctant permission.
A few weeks later, Liko contracted malaria, and he died on a transport ship en route to Ghana on January 20, 1896, before even witnessing battle. Victoria was wretched. Her favorite child was now bowed with her own grief, the two black-clad women paired in misfortune. Beatrice was then made even more miserable when a grieving Louise told her she had been “Liko’s confidante and Beatrice meant nothing to him, indicated by a shrug of the shoulders!” Biographer Lucinda Hawksley concludes that “the likelihood of Liko having found Louise a more sympathetic confidante (in the true meaning of the word) than Beatrice was very high.” Beatrice, known as “the shy princess,” would live out the last part of her life as she had the first: devoted to her mother, and to the preservation—and sanitization—of her mother’s words. Her life’s work would become the rewriting and editing of her mother’s diaries, in one of the greatest acts of censorship in history.
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Dr. Reid did not give up in his mission to discredit Karim, and in 1897, he finally had some success. Earlier that year, in February, Dr. Reid had spoken with the queen “about the Munshi having a relapse of venereal disease.” When told that Karim’s gonorrhea had flared up again in December, the queen was “greatly taken aback.” But it was Karim’s self-serving and unseemly quest for publicity that finally gave the queen pause. A photo published in the Daily Graphic on October 16, 1897, showed the rounding queen, dressed in a white shawl and black feathered hat, signing papers as a portly Karim stood next to her, looking at the camera with a self-satisfied, challenging air. The caption was “The Queen’s Life in the Highlands, Her Majesty receiving a lesson in Hindustani from the Munshi Hafiz Abdul Karim C.I.E.” The photographer told Dr. Reid that this photograph—an embarrassing breach of household protocol—was published at Karim’s insistence. When Dr. Reid told the queen, she wrote him a fourteen-page letter, blaming herself for allowing Karim to do it:
I am terribly annoyed….I don’t know what to do….I feel continually aggrieved at my Gentlemen wishing to spy upon and interfere with one of my people whom I have no personal reason or proof of doubting and I am greatly distressed at what has happened.
She begged Dr. Reid to try to put an end to the story and avoid scandal: “My peace of mind is terribly upset. I fear I have made great blunders in this business….I can’t read this through and would beg you to burn it as well as my letter this morning.” But Karim remained.
When he later became king, in 1901, Bertie wanted to eradicate all traces of the friendship between his mother and an Indian clerk, and he had all the Munshi’s papers burn
ed in a large bonfire.Victoria had directed that Karim was to have a place in her funeral procession, but shortly after the funeral, Bertie ordered the Munshi and his wife to leave for India immediately. He sent detectives to India to monitor Karim in case he had smuggled confidential papers out of England. The Munshi returned to Agra, grew fatter on the land the queen had procured for him, and died in 1909, aged only forty-six. Karim never spoke ill of the royal family. His name will forever be conjoined with that of his doting, credulous queen.
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One morning in 1896, Gladstone woke with a guilty start. He had been dreaming he was having breakfast with Victoria. They appeared to have had a sexual encounter, which involved some fumbling and confusion about “the how and where of access.” This dream horrified him—it was of course unimaginable that he and the queen would ever have been so intimate. There would be a faint moment of rapprochement, though, the next year. In 1897, thanks to Victoria’s daughter Louise, Gladstone and his wife, Catherine, saw Victoria in a hotel in Cannes. For the first time, Victoria and Gladstone, both half-blind, elderly, and walking with difficulty, shook hands. The queen pronounced them both “much aged.” The two ironclads spoke for a few minutes, after which Gladstone decided “the Queen’s peculiar faculty and habit of conversation had disappeared.” He was eighty-seven years old and struggling with facial neuralgia, cheek cancer, and catarrh, which had prompted a retreat from any political activity. The last speech he gave was on September 24, 1896—on renewed atrocities by the Turks in Bulgaria. While preparing for her Diamond Jubilee in 1897, Victoria did not ask Gladstone to take any part in it.
In the early morning hours of May 19, 1898, four years after leaving office, Gladstone died. The cause of death was recorded as “syncope senility”; his heart had stopped beating. Even the solemnity of his death did not prevent Victoria being churlish. She was reluctant to write to Catherine Gladstone because she had simply not liked the man: “How can I say I am sorry when I am not?” In a letter to Vicky, she explained her abiding disrespect: “I cannot say that I think he was ‘a great Englishman.’ He was a clever man, full of talent, but he never tried to keep up the honor and prestige of Gt Britain. He gave away the Transvaal & he abandoned Gordon, he destroyed the Irish church & he tried to separate England from Ireland & he set class against class. The harm he did cannot be easily undone….But he was a good & vy religious man.” Gladstone’s death was, very oddly, not noted in the Court Circular. Victoria later told the prime minister, Lord Salisbury, that this had been “entirely an oversight.”
A quarter of a million people came to gaze at Gladstone’s body lying in state in Westminster Abbey before his funeral on May 28. Bertie, who had always had a friendly relationship with Gladstone, acted as pallbearer at the funeral, as did his only surviving son, the future George V. When she heard of Bertie’s intention to carry her former foe’s coffin, Victoria telegraphed him to ask why: Whose advice had he followed and what was the precedent? The Prince of Wales wrote back bluntly that he was not aware of a precedent and had not acted on advice. In a subsequent telegram to Catherine Gladstone, the highest praise Victoria could summon for Gladstone, the man now described as the colossus of the Victorian age, was that he was “one of the most distinguished statesmen of my reign.” The queen would not be commissioning a rash of statues of the Grand Old Man in the towns of Britain. Prime ministers, children, friends, and relatives continued to die around Victoria as she pressed on: some of her subjects were beginning to think her immortal.
CHAPTER 29
The Diamond Empire
No-one ever, I believe, has met with such an ovation as was given to me….The cheering was quite deafening, and every face seemed to be filled with real joy.
—QUEEN VICTORIA, JUNE 22, 1897
There is no one depressed in this house; we are not interested in the possibilities of defeat; they do not exist.
—QUEEN VICTORIA, 1900
A reign that spanned six decades, Oscar Wilde declared, should be celebrated with aplomb. For the occasion of Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, the dramatist decided to throw a marvelous party for the local village children in Berneval-sur-Mer in France, where he had gone following his release from English prison on charges of gross indecency. Sporting a bright turquoise shirt, he ladled out “strawberries and cream, apricots, chocolates, cakes and sirop de grenadine…a huge iced cake with Jubilee de la Reine Victoire in pink sugar, just rosette with green, and a wreath of red roses around it all.” He gave the children musical instruments as presents and tried to arrange them into an orchestra playing Britain’s national anthem. Wilde conducted as horns blasted and accordions swung.
More champagne was imported in 1897, the year of Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, than in any year before in British history. It was a celebration of imperial might, as well as the core contradiction of Victorianism: massive change and expansion coupled with an apparently unchanged monarch. Victoria was celebrated as the pivot point of the empire, almost the very axis of the earth. The somberly dressed seventy-eight-year-old woman had now reached near-mythical status. Remote tribes in Papua New Guinea worshipped her, stern statues of her studded cities across the globe, and people claimed to spy her profile in American mountain ranges. In W. T. Stead’s journal the Review of Reviews, her image was placed next to Abraham Lincoln’s: “The high water mark of realized success in the Evolution of Humanity,” the journal declared, could be seen in “the production of the supreme American man in the person of Abraham Lincoln and the supreme English woman in the person of Queen Victoria.”
When her chair was wheeled out onto the Buckingham Palace balcony on the day of her Diamond Jubilee, a voice heard amid the noise yelled, “Go it, old girl!” Victoria, at seventy-eight, was too crippled to step out of her carriage; an open-air service was held outside St. Paul’s Cathedral so that she did not need to. Victoria believed her six decades of work gave her the right to demand that she not have to leave her carriage, that she would not be compelled to pay for the celebration, and that no pompous state ceremonial was necessary. She did not want to host a clutch of royals, at great expense and inconvenience, for the second time in a decade, and she therefore ordered that no reigning kings or queens be invited. This included her first grandson, Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was furious. The focus of this Jubilee, instead of visiting monarchs and aristocrats, became empire—a territory that now spanned a quarter of the globe.
Many subjects believed their queen now had some mystical power to control the skies: the sun shone brilliantly as her carriage rolled along the streets on the day of the Jubilee. When an enormous balloon marked VICTORIA floated up through the trees, a small girl stopped to stare: “Look! There’s Queen Victoria going to Heaven!” Victoria sat under her black lace parasol, overwhelmed and weeping. Bertie’s wife, Alix, tenderly patted her hand. The author Edmund Gosse explained the lion’s roar of the crowd as the result of “a latent magnetism passing between the Queen and her people, over the heads of her official interpreters. It was as though the Queen spoke to her subjects face to face, as if her very presence hypnotized them.” She never failed to be affected by the curtain of sound that swept the crowds before her carriage. The bond between Victoria and her subjects was stronger than ever. Life expectancy in those years was forty-six, and only one in twenty British people was over sixty-five. Almost everyone in the crowd would have known only Victoria as their sovereign.
The queen’s peers were growing older too. Tennyson had passed away five years before the Diamond Jubilee, at the stately age of eighty-three. Charles Dickens had died after a stroke in 1870, aged fifty-eight. Charles Darwin’s heart had failed in 1882, when he was seventy-three. George Eliot—or Mary Ann Evans—published Middlemarch eight years before she died in 1880 at age sixty-one. General Tom Thumb had lasted only to forty-five. But the formidable seventy-seven-year-old Florence Nightingale, who had been bedridden for thirty years with what is most likely to have been chronic brucellosis, stemming from the fever she contrac
ted in the Crimea, was still conducting her prodigious work on sanitation, famine, and hospital planning while propped up on pillows in bed. Nightingale arranged for some illuminations to hang from her balcony in London for the Jubilee: a VR in lights, with red calico.
Victoria was now aging and increasingly blind. Yet she still had a certain grace. Many who encountered her gushed about her theatrical sense of timing, her gracious movement, her smile, her silvery voice. When writer Arthur Benson met her two years before she died, he was startled by her voice: “It was so slow and sweet—some extraordinary simplicity about it—much higher than I imagined it & with nothing cracked or imperious or…wobbly. It was like the voice of a very young tranquil woman.” There are very few photographs of the queen smiling, which is unfortunate: only the stern profile has been preserved. Part of the reason is that for many years, long exposures were needed to take photographs. As Vicky once wrote to her, “my own dear Mama’s face has a charm that…no photograph can reproduce.” But Victoria did publish a “very like” photo of her beaming at her Jubilee, in which you can see how a smile transformed her face. This she did despite the objections of her daughters Helena and Beatrice, who did not think it appropriate for the queen to smile so broadly.